Tom Chivers is the Telegraph's assistant comment editor. He writes mainly on science. Not a poet - that's the other Tom Chivers. Read older posts by Tom here.

The Guardian's strange attacks on depression research

It's funny. Of all British newspapers, The Guardian is the keenest on scientific rigour. It's the paper that gave us Ben Goldacre and Martin Robbins, and everyone who cares about factual accuracy in reporting should be grateful for that. But yesterday, it published two pieces that it would tear to pieces if they appeared elsewhere.

Of course, that's not how the study, carried out by the universities of Bristol and Exeter, put it. The conclusion in the abstract read: "The addition of a facilitated physical activity intervention to usual care did not improve depression outcome or reduce use of antidepressants compared with usual care alone."

Even so, that seems pretty stark. A "facilitated physical activity intervention" – that is, doctors essentially prescribing exercise to their patients, encouraging them to be more active as a treatment for their depression – has no effect on depression. To Simon Hattenstone and Mark Rice-Oxley, the two Guardian writers who addressed this topic, this was literally unbelievable.

"That's certainly baffling to me," says Rice-Oxley. "[E]very time I got out to yomp in the park, I felt better. Once I was stronger, every swim, every cycle ride and eventually every game of football left me buzzing. It's not just the chemical effects on the brain, which I admit I am not qualified to talk about with any authority. It's the fact of taking yourself out of yourself for a few moments, forgetting your predicament, changing the wallpaper and breaking the cycle of rumination, mental agonising and loneliness that depression can inflict."

Hattenstone agrees. "I'm no expert, but you don't need to be to work out why exercise can work wonders," he says. "We feel less self-loathing and existential nausea because we are doing stuff, probably making ourselves look a little better in the process; we feel mildly triumphal because we're not allowing the demons to dominate; we're getting out into the fresh air, seeing and feeling the sun (which is just what depressives at their nadir tend to deny themselves), we're more social (nodding and smiling at fellow runners), develop a sense of camaraderie and solidarity, generally feel more optimistic and included in the world, and most importantly we get a buzz."

For sufferers of depression this must be an enormously sensitive topic. How dare someone come in with their data analysis and tell them that what the euphoria, the relief from the sometimes crippling symptoms of a horrible disease, is an illusion? What do they know? Hattenstone, summoning to his defence anecdotes from the depression-suffering sportsmen Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stan Collymore, calls the research "churlish" and "patronising", and says "perhaps we should rely on self-knowledge rather than research when it comes to depression". Rice-Oxley tells of one depression sufferer who "told me recently that he had done the London marathon and triathlon. He felt so great, he came off his antidepressants."

I don't know Rice-Oxley's work very well, but I'm a huge fan of Simon Hattenstone, and I honestly don't want to make light of their personal experience. I have no doubt that they do find that exercise helps them with their illness. But research can't be "churlish" or "patronising" – facts are facts, remember. Furthermore, the "relying on self-knowledge" and self-administering an end to drugs because he felt great after a marathon stuff scares me. I know some mentally ill people who've decided to come off their drugs because they feel good that day, and it has not always ended well.

But more importantly, I think they're fighting a straw man. No one is telling them that their exercise doesn't make them feel better. The study is investigating "facilitated physical activity interventions" – prescribed exercise. That's not actually the same as exercise, and Rice-Oxley does acknowledge this: "Being told to exercise might have a very different psychological effect to doing it autonomously." It could well be that people who exercise to treat depression are self-medicating wisely, because it does make them feel better. What the study found is that people who are advised to exercise do not, on average, do better than people who are given the ordinary treatments. I imagine it is possible that exercise makes some people better and some people worse, for instance, which might keep the average roughly the same.

Or, as the BMJ's own editorial points out: "Patients in both groups therefore already received high quality care, and 57% were taking antidepressants at recruitment. It may have been difficult for the addition of a physical activity intervention to make an appreciable difference." Further, about 25 per cent were already meeting Government exercise guidelines, so there may have been "little room for the intervention to make a difference". The BMJ says that there has still been insufficient research.

While this study has many strengths, including its large size and randomised design, it is important to bear in mind its limitations. This study assessed just one type of exercise intervention that involved facilitating greater activity levels. Therefore, this study does not tell us whether other types of support or exercise programme may have a positive effect on depression. Consequently, the study’s findings do not mean that no exercise interventions can reduce symptoms of depression, especially as there is some evidence from systematic reviews that certain types of exercise intervention may be therapeutic. Also, there are other benefits of exercise beyond those related to mental health.

Here's the thing, the takeaway, the bottom line: if you suffer from depression, and you find exercise helps, for God's sake carry on exercising. This is a study into the prescription of exercise by doctors, and even if it found that the exercise doesn't reduce symptoms in most patients that doesn't mean it can't help you. But don't start rejecting the whole concept of data-driven research into depression and mental illness solely because it seems to disagree with your own experience. I'm going to hand over to Dr Pete Etchells, a psychologist who himself suffers from depression, for the last word:

If you rely on anecdotal evidence, then health policies (any sorts of policies, actually) just become a shouting match where whoever yells the loudest gets their way. Sometimes, when I get depressed, I eat loads of chocolate. Sometimes it makes me feel better. If we were to appeal to self-knowledge, then on the basis of my 'evidence', the NHS would be sponsored by Cadbury's and we'd be paying £7.40 for a bar of Dairy Milk at the pharmacy. And weirdly, it might actually work for some people. The thing is, other treatments would work better and for more people. So for the vast majority of people, eating chocolate would not only be a monumental waste of time and money for everyone involved, it would also have the more threatening implication that people would not be having the proper treatment that they should be getting – the one that actually works. The only way that we can figure out what those treatments are is through randomised controlled trials and solid, objective research.